Maxing out the 9500

[Gil]

So here;s my upgrade plans for the 9500:

Processor - Sonnet Crescendo PCI 1GHz G4 upgrade

Memory - 1.5 GB RAM, Interleaved

Disk - 5-100 GB SATA Drive *

OR

CompactFlash, as an alternative to a Hard drive. Good? Bad?

Controller - Sonnet PCI SATA card (if *1)

Peripheral -

Sonnet Tempo USB2/FireWire PCI.

Wacom digitizer tablet. - Done

MOTU MIDI Timpiece AV.

Software -

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (Good? Bad?)

MOTU Digital Performer 5 - Done

Adobe Suite CS4

Microsoft Office 2008:Mac - Done

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions?

 

[Rodus]

Leopard = Bad, very bad. The G4 may drop your bus speed to 40 mhz (9500's seem to be quirky this way, at least it happened with my G3 cpu) and X.5 is slow enough on a 100 mhz bus. Your graphics card won't support core image either. Stick with tiger for X as anything more will turn it into a silicon tortoise. Or go with OS 9, the speed will be incredible.

SATA, cheaper (AFAIK) and more then fast enough with the aforementioned bus speed.

If you're really on a spending spree with it make sure you bung in a Radeon 9200 PCI as well.

 

[Gil]

Thanks for your input! I was thinking of Dual-ing 10.4.11 and OS 9, on seperate SATA drives. Though I want to keep them small, as I only want to use it for the OS and Applications. I like to keep things on a centralized network server.

As for graphics, I currently have a 3dFX Voodoo 3000 installed, but the computer came with an ATI Mach 64. Not sure which is better. I heard Radeon 9000 Mac Edition is the best out there?

I'm considering getting a SATA DVD Burner to replace the stock SCSI CD ROM drive. If one of those Sonnet cards has 2 ports, and I use 2 of them for Disk drives, can I get 2 of the Sonnet cards, or would that screw something up?

Memory Interleaving. I hear in some cases that this actually compromises performance. Advice?

I really appreciate your input!

 

[equill]

If you use FPM RAM, which you must in a 9500, interleaving as you work down from A6/B6, and certainly do not mix FPM and EDO RAM, you will get the promised performance increment.

My own experience was that 1GB of RAM in a 9500 was overkill (never necessary), was likely to give VM a debilitating case of envy unless about 100MB was permanently dedicated to a RAM Disk to immobilize it, and that most of my effort was better expended on a 9600 Kansas Mac, which I did. The 9600 also uses cheaper EDO RAM, although it can use FPM instead.

de

 

[avw]

Controller - Sonnet PCI SATA card (if *1)

My informations are:

On Sep 20, 2008,

> Is your "Tempo Serial ATA" card now compatible with the Power Macs

> 7200 - 9600? At the Product Page the compatibility is written from

> G3 (B&W), and at the Onlinestore from 7200 even 4400.

>

> Now my question is, if the card ist PCI 2.2 (with the 5v vs. 3.3 V

> Problem) or PCI 2.0 as in 9600 etc.

That's a very large typo that I'll have to get fixed immediately. The

product page is correct, the online store is wrong.

So you can't use the TSATA cards in those older machines. Sorry!

Neal

Sonnet Customer Service

support@sonnettech.com

My Projovian also doesn´t work with "Oldworld Macs". Like as the SeriTek and Acard PCI-Adapters seem to work only with PCI 2.2 (from G3) not with PCI 2.0 (-9600).

If anybody got a PCI SATA-Card working within an Oldworld Machine please tell me how!

 

[LCGuy]

Thats odd...didn't coius say that he had his 9500 running one with a 1TB SATA drive for a while?

 

[coius]

Yup. That's right! Also works in the 7200, and the 7500 (I had a G3 Upgrade on it). Supported booting and everything!

Right now, my SATA card is in the G4 Sawtooth at my feet with dual 400GB HDDs, and it works great. Hell, I had OS X booting off the SATA in my 7500 at one time. It's ok... but I had a G3 400Mhz upgrade in it.

I was surprised that I got the card. I traded a computer (Pentium IV Tower) for an IDE card that was told it worked. Well, it was a PC IDE Card, and when I told the guy, when he didn't respond, I figured I wasn't going to get my tower back or a card... Until...

7 business days later the card showed up on my porch with a letter that said the guy was sorry for not sending me an email as he was having issues with his mail server (at a company) that kept rejecting all his outbound mail.

So i had a pleasant surprise when it showed up. I popped it into the 9500 (and a 7500) and it worked great. Under 8.1 and 9.2.2 it showed up as 939GB (one terabyte based 1000) and I installed a system. But I had an issue with the TB Drive. I had to format it in half (400GB, 539GB) because OS 9 wouldn't boot. But this was only with a terabyte drive. Any other drive was unaffected by this quirk. Anyways, I got OS X installed on it as well, and it worked great

I would say go for it! If you can get one cheaply, get it!

It will speed up things over a lousy 5MB/s or 10MB/s SCSI Bus. Be sure you have an HDD in it that will support the speeds you want (Which should be practically every drive now)

 

[avw]

Yup. That's right! Also works in the 7200, and the 7500 Supported booting and everything!
I would say go for it! If you can get one cheaply, get it!

Which card? The Sonnettech? An PC-Card?

(My Projovian also worked for a while, but not booting from Oldworlds. Later I figured out that some files where damaged, ... )

 

[Rodus]

The mach 64 card is horrible, if the one that came with your 9500 is the same as mine it has 2MB VRAM and is very slow.

I think they are basically standard ATI Rage cards.

As far as I know the Radeon 9200 is the fastest GPU available for PCI Macs

 

[Lateralus]

I'm in the process of rebuilding a 9600 into a Super Mac. I've picked up a Radeon Mac Edition (faster than the 7000) after deciding that the 9200 was overkill and would inhibit me from being able to run any version of System 7.

Currently, I'm debating between a few different CPU upgrade options offered to me on LEM Swap. It's either a high-end Sonnet Crescendo G3 (450-500), an XLR8 Carrier with a slower G3/G4 that would allow me to fidget with the bus speed, or a lightly used 1GHz Sonnet G4.

I only have around 256MBs of RAM in the machine, and will need either an ATA card or a faster SCSI CD-ROM and larger SCSI hard drive.

What sucks is that I had a lot of the stuff I need (especially the SCSI stuff) before deciding that my youthful Mac-tinkering days were behind me and throwing it out last year.

 

[Gil]

I'm in the process of rebuilding a 9600 into a Super Mac. I've picked up a Radeon Mac Edition (faster than the 7000) after deciding that the 9200 was overkill and would inhibit me from being able to run any version of System 7.
Currently, I'm debating between a few different CPU upgrade options offered to me on LEM Swap. It's either a high-end Sonnet Crescendo G3 (450-500), an XLR8 Carrier with a slower G3/G4 that would allow me to fidget with the bus speed, or a lightly used 1GHz Sonnet G4.

I only have around 256MBs of RAM in the machine, and will need either an ATA card or a faster SCSI CD-ROM and larger SCSI hard drive.

What sucks is that I had a lot of the stuff I need (especially the SCSI stuff) before deciding that my youthful Mac-tinkering days were behind me and throwing it out last year.

I'm going to be going with the 1 GHZ G4, simply because it would allow for use of modern software. I am gonna scrap the SCSI and go with SATA most likely, for the drives.

I currently have a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 PCI VGA card, dealy. Is that good?

 

[Rodus]

^^I think you're right to stick with the Radeon Mac Edition, I contemplated a 9200 as well but the bus speed was going to be too much of a limiter and the obscene prices in the UK put me off. If you want to take this machine to the max then go for the G4 1Ghz, crazy but fun.

 

[Lateralus]

I've never tried, so I don't know; how far back, operating system wise, can you make use of a SATA package?

Part of my desire in rebuilding this 9600 is to make it something of a 'Classic Mac OS Showcase', and System 7 is a must.

 

[Gil]

I've never tried, so I don't know; how far back, operating system wise, can you make use of a SATA package?
Part of my desire in rebuilding this 9600 is to make it something of a 'Classic Mac OS Showcase', and System 7 is a must.

I think Sonnet's SATA card is compatible with Mac OS 9.

 

[Bunsen]

The best source for System 7 compatibility info is http://main.system7today.com/

 

[trag]

There isn't any difference between the RAM the 9600 Kansas expects and the 9500. They both use exactly the same chipset on the motherboard, with a few wiring differences in the CPU socket, and the 9600 Kansas omits the 512KB cache from the motherboard. However, the empty pads are there for the chips.

To really be compltely maxed out you need a Kansas ROM DIMM to install in the 9500. It doesn't really give you any advantage to speak of, but it makes the machine think it is a 9600/ Kansas machine and if you use a G3 processor it allows you to enable Speculative Processing.

 

[Gil]

There isn't any difference between the RAM the 9600 Kansas expects and the 9500. They both use exactly the same chipset on the motherboard, with a few wiring differences in the CPU socket, and the 9600 Kansas omits the 512KB cache from the motherboard. However, the empty pads are there for the chips.
To really be compltely maxed out you need a Kansas ROM DIMM to install in the 9500. It doesn't really give you any advantage to speak of, but it makes the machine think it is a 9600/ Kansas machine and if you use a G3 processor it allows you to enable Speculative Processing.

Speculative Processing? I'm not familiar with that term.

 

[Dog Cow]

Speculative Processing? I'm not familiar with that term.

Oh sure, it's the trendiest new buzz-word in the industry. It means to manipulate data on occurrences which could occur, such as MS Word which thinks to itself, "I think I'll send this document to the printer, because it looks like he's writing a letter."

Generally this requires the user to have locked his computer chair back comfortably into the speculatin' position beforehand.

 

[trag]

Speculative Processing? I'm not familiar with that term.

Down in the machine language guts, when the instruction pipeline spots a branch instruction (if statement in any of it's many incarnations, e.g. top part of a while loop) at the decode stage, speculative processing is when the CPU makes a guess as to which branch will be taken and starts loading the appropriate instructions into the pipeline and executing them, rather than just filling the pipeline with nops (no-operations) until the branch is resolved. Guess right and processing time is saved. Guess wrong, and it costs you the same amount of time doing nothing would have.

There is some kind of bug with G3 processors speculative processing in x500 and x600 (non-Kansas) machines. Most of the G3 upgrade makers long since came out with software solutions--such as the ability to disable speculative processing in the control panel. However, the firmware (ROM) of the Kansas machines is compatible with the G3 speculative processing. Using it can gain you a few percentage points of performance.

And since the Kansas ROM work fine in all of the x500 machines and in the 7200 (surprise, given that the 7200 is a somewhat different chipset) there's just no reason not to use the Kansas ROM in those machines except for the fact that there aren't any of the physical ROM modules available except maybe five of them.